Make your hotel reservation today at the Hotel 24 South! The room rate for VAS members is $119/night and reservations need to be made by December 9 to guarantee that rate. Call the 24 South directly at (540) 885-4848 and be sure to mention The Virginia Association of Surveyors to get the VAS rate.

In order for the title to a parcel of land to effectively pass from one person or entity to another, the land surveyor and the attorney must work “hand-in-hand.”  Both of these professionals need to fully understand the various items listed in a title report, and then determine how the descriptions found in the recorded documents match to what is found “in the field.” To make any determinations as to the limits of ownership of a parcel of land, both the surveyor and the attorney must be knowledgeable about how properties are described, and how such items found from a field-run survey such as encroachments and overlapping boundary lines may apply to claims of adverse possession, or a possible prescriptive easement; and how the basic principles of real estate law have developed over hundreds of years, always with the thought in the back of the mind of those professionals that a court of law may be needed to resolve any discrepancies. To fully understand how this relationship works between the surveyor and the attorney, the surveyor must have a thorough understanding of such terms such as “marketable title,” and what does “best evidence” mean, and how does one “quiet” the title to a disputed tract of land, and what is a “quitclaim,” and why the surveyor must abide by all of the applicable rules and regulations governing the profession of surveying.  This should be a very informative session for all of the land surveyors in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and which will be combined with a lot of fun.

Jim Demma is an attorney and a licensed professional land surveyor in Maryland.  He has more than more than 40 years of experience dealing with boundary disputes, easements, real estate contracts, titles, conveyancing, title insurance, land patents, boundary disputes, quiet title actions and condominium developments. He has supervised and conducted over 10,000 real estate settlements for residential, commercial and industrial properties in Maryland and Washington, D.C., including the review of title examinations for those properties. He has represented purchasers, property owners, sellers and lenders in all phases of real estate development, including related litigation. Jim is a frequent instructor on survey law issues for the Maryland Society of Surveyors and has provided his expertise to other surveying, law, and related organizations.  He has been editor of several survey law books and is an instructor on Survey Law at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC).